[RE-RELEASE] Episode 19: “We’ve been looking for you”: A Conversation with Dr. Sidney Stone Brown on Native Self-Actualization, Maslow’s Hierarchy, and the Data We Need

Hey, Podkin, we have some exciting news. In anticipation of the release of Shane's new book, Pedagogy's A Voice, Street Data and the Path to Student Agency, Corwin Press is offering 30% off all pre-orders on their website. So visit Corwin.com to learn more. And now here's your episode. This re-release of episode 19, we've been looking for you with Dr. Sidney Stone-Brown on native self-actualization, Maslow's hierarchy, and the data we need is the episode you didn't know you needed for such a time as this. If you look at this data things, especially during this current administration, and see clowns to the left of you and jokers to the right, Dr. Sidney Stone-Brown reminds us that nature offers us a natural defense. If you find yourself being called upon by your ancestors to disrupt and dismantle generational cycles of addiction, whether they be to substances, people, or patterns, Dr. Sid shares the black fit story of blood clot, which may give you the courage to go into the belly of the monster in order to heal yourself and release others. And if you find yourself struggling to make sense of mistreatment or betrayal that has robbed you of your dignity and humanity, Dr. Sid's personal story about forgiveness towards the end of the episode will free you in the most counter-intuitive way. So potkin, grab your favorite beverage and your journal as you settle in to listen to episode 19. We've been looking for you, a conversation with Dr. Sidney Stone-Brown. I promise you will find a message that feels divinely designed for you. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Shane Saffir. And I'm Alcine Mumby, and this is Street Datapod, where we dream with you about next generation schools that affirm, love, and value every learner. Here we have conversations about healing, hope, and listening at the margins. All right, friends, so we are in season three of this podcast experiment, this wild and wacky thing. I've seen it. I have been birthing and co-parenting together. And in this season, we are exploring what does the street data model look like in action? And today, friends, we are so humbled to have as a guest the illustrious and brilliant scholar, thinker, just amazing human Dr. Sidney Stone-Brown. We just wanted to start by welcoming you, Dr. Stone-Brown. Welcome. Thank you. I needed to look behind me to see who you were talking about, because that doesn't, doesn't match. Oh, Dr. Brown, I say, all right, if you need a union card, you can call me Sidney. Some people call me Sidney, and if you're mad at me, you could call me Sidney Ann, and I know my mom and dad are there saying, well, Sidney Ann. I love that. We're going to stay away from that, Sid. I will take the invitation. Just want to thank you so much for what I know is probably a labor of love, but I just love your book. In fact, I have two copies, and one of them is upstairs in my bed. So that's the one that's most annotated, so I might have to run upstairs and grab my copy that's upstairs in my bed. So profound and inspiring. So I'm going to start us off as we love to do with our guests. We want to start with story. So we want you to begin with your story. Who is Sidney Stone, or who was Sidney Stone as a young girl growing up, and what experiences led you to the work you do in the fields of addiction and healing in Native communities? You know, when I was asked to call in my ancestors, I called my great-grandma, Melinda Ren, who was a translator for one of our treaties. I heard she did that at 12. It may be older, but I can't remember for sure. I'm getting to that age where I don't remember things. And then I called in my great-great-grandmother, many victories. And she was one of the first women, Native Blackfoot women, to marry outside of her people, which is a Frenchman. They called him Choucat because it was Chouquette. And when I was a little girl, I lived first in East Glacier with my great aunt, Ellen, who was fluent in the language. In fact, all my aunts spoke multiple languages. I just think that language is really an important aspect of how we convey information. Anyway, I was exposed to my Blackfoot language at that time, and heard it daily through my great-aunt and uncle. And then we moved to my great-grandmother's log house out on Milk River on my reservation. And I lived there for five years. And my great-aunt, Ellen Lone Chief, used to come and drum and sing and talk to us. And she told us a story about Blood Boy. And you can look up our story. But basically, the story is that there's greed and lack of generosity on the part of a son-in-law who is starving his elders, his in-laws, and they're not taking care of them. And they would just take any little thing that they could to be able to survive. And it's so against our values and the way we are to live and to take care of each other. And they had a blood clot that they put in the soup, and it emerged as a baby. And the baby traveled around the teepee poles, rolling and then growing and then walking and then standing and then moving to full life, and said he was going to help them and take care of them and renew them. And he went out to find where all the people were being taken, and they call it a vacuum. That's an English word that would describe being sucked into something that you can't get out of. And as a result, he found this monster. He allowed the monster to eat him, and he went into the monster. He broke off a rib and he split open the stomach, and he let out the people who were still alive. And if you want to know why I am who I am and how I became, my aunt Ellen kept telling us that story over and over and over again. And as a young person, I would wonder, well, why did she tell us that story? What does that mean? What is that about? When I think about who I am and how I got to be who I am, that story has a lot to do with it. Now, I'm just gradually beginning to learn the language, and I know words. I'm by no means learning phrases yet, but that's my next journey. When I think of addiction, I think of that monster swallowing our people and removing us from our villages and our communities and preventing us from having life. If anything, I feel like what the work in addiction is all about is helping people redefine themselves, restore their dignity, and allow them to be the person that they were meant to be. And I've been at it for a long time. My sobriety date, and yes, I'm in recovery, alcohol was my drug of choice. My first accident was three months, then my second accident was six weeks. And then I walked into a bar in East Glacier, Montana, after I went back home to work. And somebody said, oh, I said, I didn't know you drank. And I said, yeah, occasionally, lies, lies, lies. Anyway, long story short, my sobriety began on May 10th of 1972, and it's been a day at a time. And recovery has been a journey, and it's a beautiful life. And I have no regrets. I made mistakes. I had trouble and confusion and doubt and all of the pain that so many people go through. And we call that empathy, not sympathy. But so many people get sucked into that monster, and they don't know how to get out. And so I feel like what we do in the field is open the doors so that people can have a life. And then it's a choice to live, if they so choose, and be the person they were meant to be. Before we go to our next question, I just want to name how beautifully you told that story. And it's a story that's going to sit with me for many, many, many moons. But what it reminds me of, there's a proverb, African proverb that I often use that's like, knowledge is only rumor until it lives in the bones. And there's certain things that you have to know, like you have to have experienced to truly know how to gracefully guide others through and out. And you're making me remember that, to tie it back to the field that Shane and I do. So we get to work with the young people. We get to work with humans at some of their most graceless and clumsy points of their lives when they're teenagers and they're young people and making all those mistakes or what we call mistakes. And I just think about how our current system throws so many young people away because they're not perfect and they make those mistakes and they forget that that's not the end of the story. There's a through that these young people get to live and we get to be in community with them and help guide them. So I am so deeply appreciative that you became a scholar through that lived experience. It's much needed and it shows in your work, the grace and the compassion and the empathy. So thank you for sharing your story. [Music] So I want to go into your book for a minute and note that to write this incredible book, which is nested together with so many stories and models. And one of the things you did is went to the National Psychology Archives in Akron, Ohio, right, where you excavated some of the untold stories of the work of Abraham Maslow, the author of the so-called Maslow's Hierarchy. And I think what I've learned from you around that model and its roots in the Blackfoot worldview and ways of knowing has really transformed a lot of my thinking as a sort of practitioner writer. We would love to hear what you learned in those archives that transformed your perspectives and how that informed the model that you created. It wasn't from the archives that I gained my understanding. It was from my elders in Canada. I went up there to give a brief presentation. I was standing in an auditorium with a few people in it. And I started describing the octagon that are in the book and how that came about. And they said that came from here. And I said, I dreamed it. And they said, we've been looking for you. So basically after that encounter, they took me up aside. And they said, Sid, we want you to write a book to set the record straight. They didn't say that Maslow was wrong. What they did say is Maslow, the way it's displayed, isn't congruent with our worldview. And we want to be able to help the world understand that. So I had visualized it as an octagon and the areas of our life that we need to develop. And that became the assessment tool that came out of my dissertation. And we had 18 questions that were high fidelity in terms of capturing people's view of the world from a modern to a traditional perspective. And we're now working on and I need to find a funding source and non-governmental, by the way, to be able to make it electronically scored so it can be out there and available for school systems and for treatment settings to be able to look at individuals who understand that our healing is going to come from our wholeness. And, you know, you can use the term holistic, but you really have to be culturally relevant and culturally responsive. And if you know that there's over 557 federally recognized tribes in the United States alone, we're not counting what's in Canada or South America or Central America. What I can tell you as a Blackfoot woman and a member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana, as I'm a member of the Confederacy of our people, and they were prisoners of war when they were placed on them, my grandparents had to have a pass to be able to leave the reservation and had to describe to the agent who was over the reservation when they would be returning and what they were going to be doing. So for me, that is essential that we understand that we cannot have the world controlled by agents. So when I'm reading your book and I go agency, I go, oh no, that's an English word that is not going to resonate well with Native people because that's an agent and the agent is someone who has oppressive control over others. Interesting. So that just be in my tracks. When I think of the Maslow's hierarchy of need, they always presented as a pyramid. And that wasn't Maslow, by the way. That was actually the corporations of America. He was doing industrial occupational training in corporations and they had him put it into a pyramid to motivate their employees. So now let's go back to what he would have learned for the six weeks that he was on the Blackfoot Reserve. And I do reference the anthropological report that came out of many years of working with Native people on the Cicica Reserve in the study they did in the book. So people are able to look to see and find those original information. But Maslow, when he left, I believe he was transformed. He began to see the world very differently than what he had seen in the past. And in that process of understanding, I want to say that we need to flip the paradigm. So if you think of it as an inverted TB, and this was what came to me after talking to the elders, is that if we look at what the elders were telling him, is first we come from the spirit world. Now our belief system is this, that we already know where we're going to be at what era and time. We choose our parents. We know what we're getting into. We know the promise, spiritual promise that we made before we ever arrived. And so when you say why me, you already made that decision. So we come into this world and we're welcomed. That every human being, every plant, every animal, everything has a spirit. And we're all equal in spirit. And in that process of understanding, that relationship, that's what our worldview is about, is that we form a relationship and create a purposeful life for living. So when we come, we have this purpose. We're welcomed. The next thing that happens is people are protected from unwanted influences. So I asked the elders how we ended up being back against the Rocky Mountains. And they now have proof that we've been there 25,000 years. When I think of my teachings and the things that the elders are passing on, this is 25,000 years of knowledge. I said they use the Rocky Mountains as a natural protection against unwanted influences. So if they had the protecting the territory also meant protecting the worldview, the knowledge, and the way of life, the Blackfoot way of knowing was what was being protected. As we look at the next step in that process, and we have a sense of belonging. Now, that sense of belonging is that you are part of this family. You are part of this band. You are part of this tribe. You are part of this language. You are part of this history. You are part of holistically the circle of life. So the idea of time is every moment holds everything that ever was or ever will be. And they call it circular time. Now, the next thing that happens in that sense of belonging is introduction to our beliefs and our ceremonies and beginning to prepare people. So having a Blackfoot name is beginning that process as a child and then as an adult. Men can have up to four names. Women typically have two. I was named in 2016 and given the adult name, a protector of the circle. So when I think of that name, I growing into the purpose of that name. And the name gives us a sense of purpose and it gives us a spiritual connection and it gives us a sense of where we fit and belong. And then I think the biggest thing that we're taught, and I as the elder, do we have commandments and they laugh because that's not a word that belongs in our vocabulary as Blackfoot people. But they did say there was one principle that people needed to look by and that was honesty. Because all the trouble that happens in communities and relationship is the basis of dishonesty. So if we live an honest life, if we admit we're wrong, if we make amends, all those things that we're taught in recovery basically is exactly what the elders would want us to be doing. So in that honesty, we realize we're here for a purpose and that we're to give back. And that's altruism. And then the last part is what Maslow called actualization. And that actually comes from the term in the 1700s. But if you think of actualization in a traditional Native world, it's always within the community. It's never self. Although it is individualized and yes, we do it as an individual, but it's always for the well-being of all people. I'm really curious to ask you about. So in the book Street Data, one of the main concepts is the idea that in order to really improve schools and transform learning and what happens with young people in this institution, we really have to think about this concept of storytelling. And how are we listening to their stories and using the information from the stories to respond in ways that then shift what we do so that we can help them come journey back to themselves. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on why and how storytelling and listening are so crucial in bringing us back to our innate wholeness and the healing abilities as human beings in the face of all this oppression that you that you named? I think that storytelling is how people learn. They're going to remember the story. Then I told you, for example, one that influenced my life. Our understanding of stories as a child matures as we get into our teen and young adult years and our adult years and then our senior years. Those stories have deeper and deeper and deeper meanings. So the stories don't change. It's how we begin to comprehend and understand the stories. So if the stories are started in early years, all the way through the adult years and senior years, then we have that connectedness to the history and those stories that go with them. And that's how the Blackfoot people teach. So I'm going to tell you something that happened to me when I was at a ceremony in Canada this last week with my son-in-law, who is Cherokee. And he went up and all my grandchildren and my daughter and my son-in-law received Blackfoot names and were in the ceremony. And he's sitting there now. He has an MBA and he's a very bright, capable man. And they, as parents, have homeschooled their six children because they didn't want the school system to ruin them. And so basically he's sitting there looking at the ceremony and he said, this is an atom. This is a, this is, this is physics. I said, yes, it is. And he was, oh my gosh, I'm witnessing physics. That's what your knowledge is. And I said, yes, it is. He said, I wouldn't have got it. As a child, when I get it now, I see what you see. You know the universe as a people. And I said, yes, we do. What struck me in that process of listening to him is at the end of the ceremony, they, they take down the teepees. There were 123 teepees were a part of the encounter. And our family extended family had a teepee and they were taking it down. So he volunteered to help take it down. He said, I'd never done that before. I didn't know what I was doing. No one told me I did it wrong. Nobody told me how to do it. We all cooperated to get it done. And he said, I learned so much just being a part of that cooperation. So in doing together on the behalf of the community, got it. And it was taking down a teepee. It's a great metaphor. It's a great metaphor. Great metaphor. And so much learning around how, you know, we talk about pedagogy. How do you teach kids anything? And there's so much wisdom in that story of what you shared around pedagogy. Because what I also heard is that the listening is reciprocal. Because you kept saying, I was listening to him. And usually we think, oh, in American education, the young people are supposed to listen to the elders or the person with the more advanced power, degree, you know, age, all those things that show a separation or a hierarchy. And you keep coming back to this concept. We are one in the same. And I think that's the beauty of the book. It's like Shane talks about this is the opportunity for the adults who have more power in his system to actually listen and learn from the young folk who we're supposed to be doing this in service of. So we're going to move to what we call the lightning rounds. I'll see you in a nice struggle with this. We're still working on it. But essentially we have five questions. And the invitation is to answer kind of from your gut without thinking too much and briefly. So like, you know, 15 seconds or something, but you do what you need to do. So I will start. The first question is you are called to listen deeply to someone. But what they have to say is triggering or activating in some way. What's the first thing that you do? Listen, what is a practice or way of being a knowledge, a skill, a capacity that keeps you grounded as you move through this world? Identity. My dad said, if you want to know who you are and where you came from and all of this, go to Fort McLeod. You will see your grandfather. He's in bronze and he is a statue in Fort McLeod. This is Crofa and Crofa was a valued leader and also a part of the signature of Treaty 7. And so my dad was teaching me how the Confederacy was broke up by the border and not let the borders take us apart. So long story short, that's identity. Wow. Question three, what is one form of data that you think every teacher or counselor should gather? I just love that this dominant world likes to count things. Yes. Why are we counting? Because it creates this hierarchy and it creates a measurement and things can be rather than being measured. They don't have to be compartmentalized. They don't have to be broke apart. The body and mind are connected. And when they disconnected that, we had psychology and we have physiology. And they don't talk to each other, but they need to. Oh my god. Okay, that is such a word. I'm getting with your permission. I'm going to share that teaching if that's okay in future when I try to talk about the satellite data or the big data because people just really struggle to understand. You said it's so pithily and brilliantly. Well, I don't mind sharing with you. I was a delayed person. I was premature three months and born way before I was supposed to be. I had with an eyedropper. I managed to be able to stay alive. Thank god I had a purpose and a reason for being here. I lost my baby brother who was born in Whitefish, Montana because he didn't get the care that he needed. When I think of my delay, my development and the unfolding of my life, you never would have dreamed that I could have graduated from high school. You never would have dreamed that I could go to college. You would never imagine me getting a master's degree and now I have two or a doctorate. So when you measure people, you limit them because you are not looking at who they are or their sense of self. We all have limitations. I'll never be a rocket scientist. But the truth is we will find that purpose. And if we're working in education to assist people to find that purpose, then we've done our job. Here's my last question for you. A great learning experience will. What's the impact a great learning experience should have on a human? I think of what mattered to me when you asked that, that somebody believed in me. I have some experiences from school that are horrendous. I had a urinary tract infection. I had kidney failure. I was given six months to live. I wet my pants in the fifth grade and a teacher in a Catholic school. A nun stood me up in front of the class and shamed me for wetting my pants as a fifth grader. I had no control over that. It was biologically impaired. A year later when she realized I was given six months to live, she came and apologized and asked me to forgive her. And I said, no, I will not. I will not. It's between you and God. It's not between me and you. When I took a speech class in junior high school in San Jose high school, where my my parents had me for six months, I stuttered. I stammered. I turned beat red. I had anxiety attack, but I forced myself to go through the very thing that I was afraid of. And it changed my life. So when I went back to a high school that I used to be in Hood River, Oregon, and someone asked me to give a speech in front of the class, I got up and spoke. They all honestly sat with their mouths open because they did not know me to have a voice or to be able to express myself. So I didn't learn to express myself until I was a junior in high school. And that's OK, right? Yeah. That was your journey. So this idea of measuring when people will be capable and what they're capable of is the greatest misfortune of our education system in this country. And it's based on European model, and it's time for us to redesign. And that's why I love street data. OK, just this quote. Just this quote. I'm walking away today. When you measure people, you limit them. You need to let people be who they are. And I can give you an example of administering a test to a student when I was in my doctoral program. And you have to follow these very strict protocols or it will ruin the outcome. And so he froze. And I said, let's take a break. I wasn't supposed to. And I said, go get a drink of water, come back, and we'll start again. And he did. And he did just fine. And it was in math, by the way. And his mother told me afterwards he was excelling in math. So even those of us that are trained to do assessments of individuals can do great harm. Because the assessment tool is skewed to the direction of there's only a few that can succeed. Oh my gosh, there's just so many teachings in this 55 minutes we spent together. Just like they're going to multiply. Just so you know, Sid, through all of our listeners, people are going to gain so much from this. So I'm deeply grateful, deeply, deeply grateful and just want to thank you for spending time with us. And I hope we can just be in the same physical space one day, Sid. I feel such a connection to you. I really want to get to wrap my arms around you and hug you and thank you in person as well. So, appreciations for being here today. My message to all of you is remember we're all home even in spirit. Street Data Pod is executive produced and hosted by Shane Safir and Elsie Mumby. The senior producer is Maya Cueva and our production manager is Jamie Valle. Becca Bantam is our social media coordinator. A special shout out goes to Rocky Rivera for our theme, music. If you want to get a copy of Street Data, visit Amazon, corn, press, or better yet, a local independent or Black-owned bookstore. At Corwin's website, use discount code "StreetData" all caps to get 20% off. If you like the show, please take a moment to subscribe and give us a five-star review. And if you found us rambling or fumbling over our words, remember we can't be articulate all of the time. That's my dog barking at my cat. I'm sorry. Sid, can I ask two follow-ups on this? Hi, baby. Welcome. Welcome to the pod. This is Mimi. She's my cat, police.